desertrat58;175960 Wrote: > Thank you for your replies. I may have to rethink my back-up strategy. I > may just make both HDs seperate volumes (I: and J: in my case) and do > manual/scheduled back-ups from one to the other. Or maybe put one HD > into an external enclosure. The advantage to an external enclosure is that you could take it offsite for some extra protection against fire or theft of the server. If you do it internally, you'd be best off with the drive installed in a separate computer, just in case something in that PC goes terribly wrong. A virus, for instance.
> (1) To check if data is on both HDs, can I simply "delete RAID set" in > the bios. According to my controller card manual, the data remains > intact and accessible on both drives. Can I then simply reset the RAID > set through the bios after I verify, or would the PC then expect to see > blank discs to format? I'm not sure what this experiment would really prove. I wouldn't count on the data still being accessible if you delete the RAID set and then go back and recreate it. No, the data won't be physically removed - all the bits will still be there - but it may not ever be accessible again. If you're curious, try it and see, but not with any critical data. > (2) If I simply disconnect data and power cables to one HD, and keep the > bios set to RAID 1, wouldn't the PC then assume a HD crash and tell/ask > me if I want to rebuild the array? Could I then assume data had been > written to both drives? Yes, unplugging a power or data cable to the drive will look like a drive crash. Probably best to test it with each drive. > (3) The controller card manual tells me how to tell the bios to rebuild > the mirrored set, but I don't see any kind of signal that tells me a HD > has crashed. Would the bios or WinXP signal me somehow? Often there's a Windows (Linux, Mac, etc.) application available to you that can monitor the controller and notify you somehow - maybe a popup notification or via email or both. There might be an audible alarm as well. If the only means of notification comes from the RAID BIOS, then you'd likely only see a failed drive event when you boot the system - for a server that runs continuosly and/or headless, you may never know that you have a failure. > (4) Re RAID 1. I understand RAID 0 (striping) is not a back-up system, > but isn't RAID 1 (mirroring) considered back-up? I understand it is > used mainly in servers to eliminate down-time. Do servers have seperate > HDs to which data is backed-up to seperately, in addition to the HDs in > RAID arrays? No, it's very definitely not considered a backup system. The main advantage to RAID in a critical system is to remain running continuously despeite a disk failure. Yes, some type of backup is usually employed. In an IT environment, typically that's been tape backups. With larger and cheaper hard drives available, more and more today the backups are done to disk. Seldom are the backup drives located in the same system as the machine being backed up. -- JJZolx Jim ------------------------------------------------------------------------ JJZolx's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=10 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=32236 _______________________________________________ ripping mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/ripping
